Birdwatching

Peace, prosperity and anoraks

The money in birds

GUMBOOTS, anoraks and woolly hats converged on Rutland Water in Leicestershire last weekend for the world's largest birdwatching fair. In their thousands, bird enthusiasts peered through expensive telescopes, toured stalls offering birdwatching holidays and listened to lectures on projects that are creating jobs as well as saving habitats.

Britain is particularly big on what Americans call “birding”. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which helps to run the fair, has over 1m members—twice as many as America's National Audubon Society—and is Europe's largest wildlife-conservation charity. But on both sides of the Atlantic, birdwatching is not just popular, it is also big business. The Rutland Water fair, now into its 16th year, turns over around £3m ($5.4m) in three days. Much of that comes from holidays—the fair, says Tim Appleton, who runs the Rutland Water nature reserve, is now the world's most important event to promote ecotourism. But stay-at-homes spend money too. In America, a magazine called Birding Business is full of ingenious ways to market bird food (“Great packaging wows the customers and can double or triple sales volume,” promises one piece) and the latest designs in garden bird-feeders.

For companies making field glasses and telescopes, the birdwatching boom is a blessing. It has offset the stagnation or decline in game-hunting. Swarovski, an Austrian optical-equipment company, estimates that the number of serious birdwatchers in America is now somewhere between 7m and 15m. That puts them on a par with the number of hunters (around 10m). But the hunting market for optical goods has been flat for two decades, whereas sales of equipment to birdwatchers are growing by around 5% a year, in real terms. In Britain, too, things are on the up. Swarovski says that sales of its optical equipment made through specialist birdwatching dealers have been rising for a decade. Sales made through hunting dealers, by contrast, are smaller and shrinking.

Other countries are starting to get the message. In Italy, says Marco Lambertini of BirdLife International, the number of hunters has fallen from 3m in 1971 to 600,000 last year. The country's first birdwatching fair, held this spring, attracted 25,000 visitors. In Israel, Yossi Leshem, an enthusiastic bird lover, has found another use for birds. He has created a series of joint projects with Palestinian and Jordanian birdwatchers, to monitor the migrating birds which pour through that part of the Middle East twice a year. Birds, of course, do not recognise national frontiers.

The most passionate birdwatchers, known as “twitchers”, are earnest folk who pursue a rare bird to add it to a list. Stephen Moss, in a new history of birdwatching*, describes the fury of British farmers when large crowds, composed mainly of young men, trample across their fields in search of some storm-tossed migrant. One farmer sprayed twitchers with pig manure. In America, though, the locals seem friendlier—and also cannier. Richard Payne, chairman of the American Birding Association, describes how a small town in Texas earned more than $2m in six weeks last spring, thanks to the arrival of some migrating birds.